The Headlines
GOLDEN THRONE. For nearly a decade, the art world has speculated about the fate of Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious golden toilet, America, a fully functional sculpture made of 100 kilograms of 18-karat gold. One of the mystery buyers (the work comes in an edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs) has now been revealed as billionaire financier and collector Steven Cohen, owner of the New York Mets and founder of Point72 Asset Management, the New York Times reports. Cohen reportedly purchased his edition from Marian Goodman Gallery in 2017. On November 18, Sotheby’s will auction it with an opening bid of about $10 million. Cattelan’s America already has a notorious backstory (via another one of the editioned sculptures): after showing at the Guggenheim Museum it was offered to the first Trump White House, which had originally requested borrowing a van Gogh painting. That version, when it was displayed at England’s Blenheim Palace in 2019, was stolen and never recovered. Cattelan’s satirical works often mock wealth and power, much like his previous sensation, the duct-taped banana Comedian, which sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s last fall. Cohen, whose holdings includes blue-chip works by the likes of Jasper Johns and Damien Hirst, is now selling America amid growing interest from crypto collectors and art investors eager for another headline-making sale.
RECORD SALE. Sotheby’s Paris took in a combined €18.6 million ($21.5 million) from the collection of the late real estate mogul Manny Davidson across two in-person sales this week. That result, from an evening sale on Wednesday and a day sale on Thursday, marked the highest total for a single-owner sale in France this year, and with the collection’s third online sale closing on Friday, that figure will almost certainly climb higher. The top lot was Michael Sweerts’s A young man wearing a turban holding an upturned roemer: the fingernail test (1648–52), which sold on Wednesday for €1.6 million ($1.8 million) against its €800,000–€1,200,000 ($925,000–$1.3 million) estimate. That’s a decent result, but it’s worth noting that a rediscovered Sweerts sold for over $16 million at Christie’s in 2023. “The depth and quality of Manny Davidson’s collection were truly exceptional, every work told a story of passion, refinement, and curiosity,” Louis-Xavier Joseph, head of the furniture department at Sotheby’s Paris, told ARTnews after Wednesday’s sale.
The Digest
Gladstone Gallery now represents the estate of Robert Colescott. [ARTnews]
A necklace salvaged from the Titanic goes on view for the first time in a century in Orlando’s “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition.” [Artnet News]
Hundreds of people have signed a petition against the planned closure and relocation of Walsall Leather Museum in the UK. [Museums Journal]
A new collagen fingerprinting tool might help scientists identify species from archaeological bone fragments. [Phys Org]
Hyperallergic tours the Studio Museumin Harlem’s new home. [Hyperallergic]
The Kicker
Although not yet officially announced, the Art Newspaper has revealed that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is preparing a major Vincent van Gogh exhibition titled “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow,” slated to run from June 6 to October 11, 2026. A museum spokesperson said the show “will bring together two Sunflowers paintings, exploring how the artist used colour and brushwork to achieve different expressive effects.” The museum’s own Sunflowers (1889), distinguished by its turquoise background, will be joined by at least one major loan, the celebrated Arles version with a yellow background (painted in 1888) from London’s National Gallery. Since its acquisition in 1924, the London Sunflowers has traveled abroad only four times, making its forthcoming journey to Philadelphia a rare and significant event. The collaboration follows a recent exchange between the two institutions. Philadelphia’s Sunflowers was lent to the National Gallery’s acclaimed 2024 van Gogh exhibition “Poets & Lovers,” marking the first time the PMA had loaned the work since acquiring it in 1963.
